Angelus Diligo
by SleepyBard
Summary: Angel to Value Highly There is right and there is wrong. The hardship is discerning between the two. Castiel reflects.


**Title:** Angelus Diligo (Angel to Value Highly)  
**Pairing:** Dean/Castiel  
**Chapter:** 1/1  
**Wordcount:** 1,019  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Warning:** Spoilers for Season 4  
**Summary:** _There is right and there is wrong. The hardship is discerning between the two._ Castiel reflects.  
**Disclaimer:** Cofession: Not mine.  
**Author's Note:** Unbeta'ed, all mistakes are mine.

* * *

There is right and there is wrong. Before, it had always been that the one above, the one with the answers, the one unseen but worshipped, _he_ was right. With sweaty palms together, fingers laced, head bowed, there was only wrong that could be righted. But those sins can claim no guilt on already dirtied souls. Those sins are silent.

Castiel knows silence, knows it well. The look of quiet withdrawal, of stoic resignation that lines their shoulders, he understands this. When he passes churches, looks down upon them, stands among the paintings of His son, statues of the Mother, he sees them praying with hope colouring their words and doubt painting their hearts. _Hell_. The word flits through his mind, fickle and easily quieted and pushed to a corner of his mind. Silence maintained, it's alright.

And when the doubt begins to smear his own soul, what should he do? He feels like a dog; kicked, beaten, starved and bereft of what he needs -answers-, and still pressured to follow, to lead. The clouds hang overcast everyday it seems and he wonders if Father is gazing at him with His head hung in shame. From Heaven are the pains of Hell shielded by the beings caught between two worlds fighting the Great War. This too, Castiel knows intimately.

He bruises his lips trying to convince others of his plight. With every whispered _'Cas'_, his soul longs for its mate a little more, and he shudders, violently fears, the day when his heart rebels his duty. Happiness, a strange word that worms its way into his hands, where they shake with indecision, unable to decide if he should drop it like a burning coal or embrace it like a long lost friend.

The first time their eyes meet, for the first time Castiel wonders what he's doing. _'God's work'_, Uriel tells him, slight disdain tingeing his brother's words. But in the forever he's done His work, where was the affection he heard talk of? Not in the aftermath of another given miracle; the softer side of human emotion then was reserved for the good, the saved. Not in the last moments of curious gratitude as gentle hands cradled a sick lover; they had eyes only for each other. So where were his, where were the eyes which saw him only?

There is a saying amongst his garrison that when a mortal is happy it is because they flew with their own wings, and when an angel is happy it is because they flew with another's . Castiel understands now profoundly just what that means; that it really is so rare for angels to derive pleasure from another, so private and personal are they normally.

He never could have foreseen, however, that those eyes that had originally dimmed at the reluctant mentioning of his angelhood would grow to be the ones that saw him as more than simply an angel. His mate.

Castiel has no soul. He _is_ soul; embodies all that an ethereal being is told to be. He is more than merely an angel. He is a soldier, a warrior. He does what he is commanded to do with his eyes closed and his will steeled. He is always prepared, always ready to fight for what he is told is right.

But those _eyes_ like no other's…

A single gaze and Castiel falls to his knees, no longer prepared to carry out His bidding but ready to take his Grace and scream to the Heavens _'Fuck it!'_. He cannot help that the body he fills sometimes allows him to feel, a crime he had condemned other -stronger- angels for falling prey to. His emotions consume him in a burning passion when they come, and in those moments he _knows_ what it means to be more than an angel: to be human.

He had fantasised for centuries while in heaven what it would feel like to meet the soul of his mate. An honor of the highest degree, only lower to that of meeting Father himself, Castiel would dream what the moment would feel like when he found that soul, the one that would complete his shattered, battered being.

Only an angel who had served with complete, unwavering faithfulness for decades, centuries, even millennia, were gifted a mate. It was that or hope to stumble upon that one who filled the gap in your heart from above or while patrolling below. And for Castiel to have met his on earth… It should have been a blessing but how could it be, when his lifemate was the illustrious Dean Winchester?

How could he feel so honoured, gifted, when he was destined by the Fates to a forbidden, impossible love, destined _to love, to cherish_ the very soul who had brought about the apocalypse, and the one who was destined to save all? If that wasn't enough, he was to love a charge, a soul he had saved, something that ranked with disobeying an order.

_Dean Winchester_. The name rolls off Castiel's tongue with a flourish. It causes his glittery, pale alabaster wings to shiver in pleasure but his body to shudder in fear for the safety of all that he had spent years protecting; his Dignity, his Grace.

He almost feels fortunate that he is cursed to live in the body he fills with potentially no feelings, that only the strongest emotions ever filter through the careful walls of his angelic being. He is a blind man catching glimpses of light; a deaf man receiving bursts of music that pierce his quiet world; like a beggar given a morsel of the elixir of life, enough to sustain, but a dearth of true pleasure.

To live in a time when the balance of life and death hang so precariously along the edge…Castiel refuses to contemplate a world in which he is alone. He will save it, this he promises to himself, for he will do what is right, what is good, not what is _easy_. But the key, he knows, to doing so lies in saving the saviour: in saving Dean.


End file.
